Women's One Real Weakness: Envisioning - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Women outscore men in so many leadership abilities, the Harvard Business Review confirms in the January 2009 issue — but that is nothing new to readers of this site.

• But there is one aspect where female executives lag behind their male counterparts significantly: “envisioning”.

• Herminia Ibarra, the author of the report, defines envisioning as “the ability to recognize new opportunities and trends in the environment and develop a new strategic direction for an enterprise … the envisioning dimension is, for most observers, a must-have capability”.

• The results came from a 360-degree evaluation of 2,816 executives — one in five of them women — from 149 countries who were taking executive education courses at the French business school Insead.

• The research confirmed that many of the women who have moved into corporate leadership roles have realized their gains through mastery of the mechanisms and details of their tasks and industry.

• Perhaps as a result, the women rated themselves significantly higher than the men on four of the 10 dimensions analyzed, and the differences were small in the other six.

• In addition, women tended to be better viewed by their peers, bosses and subordinates than were the men by both men and women.

• Except envisioning: Here male peers (but not women) rated the female executives significantly lower than men.

• That can hurt, even when not true. Ibarra writes, “[A]s they step into bigger leadership roles — or are assessed on their potential to do so — the rules of the game change, and a different set of skills comes to the fore.”

• As part of the difference between managing (the status quo) and leadership (that drives change and innovation), women need to increase the sense of their command of envisioning, Ibarra writes.

• But why are they perceived as lacking vision?

1. Several women reviewing the data noted that they set strategy differently from men, perhaps making their ability less evident and measurable for men. More collaborative approaches to vision, for instance, can bring less credit.
2. Some women described as risky the “blue sky” thinking that is integral to envisioning. Among the concerns is how they must appear competent at all times, more so than men, making visionary approaches more dangerous to them
3. Many women demonstrated suspicion of the sort of leadership that does not operate, as they argue they operate, in “grounded, concrete, and no-nonsense” ways. The women not only described themselves as more rational but said the same of other women, much more so than of men.

• Ibarra concludes: “Having had the message drummed into their heads that they must be rational, nonemotional, and hyperefficient … makes their leadership transition more difficult, because they stick with what they know longer. … The challenge facing women, then, is to … make vision one of the things they are known for.”

• One other detail that came up from Ibarra’s research: “[M]ale peers … rated women lower on envisioning. Interestingly, female peers did not downgrade women, contrary to the frequently heard claim that women compete rather than cooperate with one another. Our data suggest it’s the men who might feel most competitive toward their female peers.

The Harvard Business Review article

Click here for a link to a video interview with Professor Ibarra on the “Vision Thing”.